News: Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark

April 28th, 2010

With the many new serving databases available including Sherpa, BigTable, Azure and many more, it can be difficult to decide which system is right for your application, partially because the features differ between systems, and partially because there is not an easy way to compare the performance of one system versus another.
The goal of the Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB) project is to develop a framework and common set of workloads for evaluating the performance of different "key-value" and "cloud" serving stores.

The project comprises two areas:

The YCSB Client, an extensible workload generator

The Core workloads, a set of workload scenarios to be executed by the generator

Although the core workloads provide a well-rounded picture of a system's performance, the Client is extensible so that you can define new and different workloads to examine system aspects, or application scenarios, not adequately covered by the core workload. Similarly, the Client is extensible to support benchmarking different databases. Although we include sample code for benchmarking HBase and Cassandra, it is straightforward to write a new interface layer to benchmark your favorite database.
A common use of the tool is to benchmark multiple systems and compare them. For example, you can install multiple systems on the same hardware configuration, and run the same workloads against each system. Then you can plot the performance of each system (for example, as latency versus throughput curves) to see when one system does better than another.